Why Conservatives Think the Ends Justify the Means (The Nation)

[OneGrassRoot]

Rick Perilstein, The Nation, April 8, 2013

Let's continue my series on the continuities on the American right: the stockpiling of guns for the coming apocalypse; the panic over textbooks and the passion for reckless spending cuts; the horror at the government sponsoring pre-school education—and, for today, the comfort the right harbors for minoritarianism: the conviction that conservatives are fit to rule even if they don't actually win elections. We've been reading about that and again these days in the way the Republican Party does business: the "Hastert rule" which doesn't let a measure get to the House floor if it can't win a majority of Republicans even if the majority of all House members want it; the Republican embrace of gerrymandering that guarantees Republican congressional majorities in states Obama won decidedly like Pennylvania; the Republican comfort with the disenfranchisement of Democratic constituencies that the Nation's Ari Berman has been covering so effectively these days. This comes from somewhere—from the nature of conservatism itself. It is an old, old story.

Let's start, though, with a question of first principles, one absolutely crucial to understanding the difference between liberalism and conservatism, one that goes very deep at the cognitive level. We'll be returning to it when I arrive at the crucial question of how that which liberals consider hypocrisy functions on the right. That first principle is the matter of procedure versus norms. As I wrote in a 2003 review of Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media?

We Americans love to cite the “political spectrum” as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles. To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world—a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman’s republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon.

A very important point. It has to do, too, with the almost opposite definitions liberals and conservatives affix to the word "principle." For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures—means—is the core of what being "principled" means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome—ends—even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being "principled" means. Think of it it, allegorically, this way: imagine in Washington DC, near Capitol Hill, a little old lady is crossing a hazardous street. A fastidious liberal congressmen, proud of always acting in a principled way in all things, stops to help her across the street—even though that means he might be late for a key vote (the sacrifice of an end, in itself, confirms his principled nature). A fastidious conservative congressman, on the other hand, leaves the lady to her fate and makes the vote (because the upholding of the end, in itself, is where honor lies—and dishonor rests, in the ultimate term of derision righties reserve for each other, in being a "squish&quot .

FULL ARTICLE: http://www.thenation.com/blog/173703/why-conservatives-think-ends-justify-means#

[liberal N proud]

1. We have said many times that the right applies Machiavelli ideals.

[Cary]

2. "Conservatives" are fascists

Fascism is a pure power grab. I don't think that's Machiavellian.

[JoePhilly]

3. They think God agrees with them. To go against them is to go against God.

And if God agrees with you, you can do anything you want.

[bemildred]

4. Conservatives are utopians who place the utopia in the past.

Otherwise the share all the defects of other utopians, the most essential being the idea that the superb and perfect end they envisiage achieving/restoring justifies no fucking end at all to injustice and atrocity here in the present.